Ex-Army Officer: Nation's gun cancer spreads

This is a discussion on Ex-Army Officer: Nation's gun cancer spreads within the The Second Amendment & Gun Legislation Discussion forums, part of the Related Topics category; Nation's gun cancer spreads | Philadelphia Inquirer | 05/03/2010
Nation's gun cancer spreads
By Patrick Walsh
After graduating from college, I served four years as ...

Ex-Army Officer: Nation's gun cancer spreads

After graduating from college, I served four years as an infantry officer in the Army's 25th Infantry Division. I fired everything from 9mm pistols to .50-caliber machine guns, routinely qualifying as "expert" with an M16A2 rifle.

It's not despite such experience, but precisely because of it, that I think the availability of guns in America is stunningly negligent public policy. And it may get worse.

One needn't be a constitutional law scholar to discern the Founding Fathers' intent in the Second Amendment. The original draft presented to the first session of the first Congress read: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person." (The emphasis is mine.)

Clearly, the framers placed the right to bear arms within the context of organized military service. They wished to highlight the distinction between state militias and the federal army. They viewed state militias as a check against the misuse of the army to impose centralized tyranny.

Even the treacherous, 27-word version of the amendment with which we contend today retains and begins with the phrase, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state ..."

Scientists talk about gene "expression" when referring to how the inherited instructions of our DNA are converted into working proteins in our bodies - an interpretive process. With interpretation can come error, and serious errors in gene expression can lead to diseases such as cancer.

America has a cancer originating in the misinterpretation of our government's DNA, the Constitution. In 2008, the Supreme Court handed down an erroneous interpretation of the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller, striking down a handgun ban in Washington and endorsing the misconception that individuals have a right to own firearms. Now, in McDonald v. City of Chicago, the court could compound the error by striking down a Chicago gun ban, extending the principle beyond the District of Columbia.

The old gun lobby claim "guns don't kill people" is specious. No one rails against the manufacture of axes or baseball bats; there are no campaigns to ban Bowie knives.

With a bolt-action rifle and a telescopic sight, I could put a bullet through my neighbor from a hundred yards away as he crosses his living room. With a Glock 17 pistol stashed in my briefcase, I could enter a boardroom, coolly dispatch a dozen executives, and still have five rounds left to deal with the security guards.

To put it another way, Virginia Tech doesn't happen if Seung-Hui Cho is brandishing a sword. Columbine doesn't happen if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are wielding Louisville Sluggers. Charles Whitman doesn't kill 14 people at the University of Texas at Austin if he takes up his sniping position armed with a longbow.

Take it from a former soldier: A gun's power is arbitrary and wildly disproportionate to its price, size, and ease of use. Before the advent of firearms, becoming dangerous meant years of training, if not membership in a warrior caste. Cho simply used a credit card to pay $571 for a Glock 19 and 50 bullets.

A Glock 19 weighs less than a quart of milk; it measures under 7 inches long. Its operation is simple: load, point, shoot 15 times, reload. In one span of nine minutes, Cho killed 30 people and wounded dozens more.

I once carried a rifle in defense of the Constitution. Now I wield a pen and must trust the adage about its superiority. But I admit to feeling outgunned by madmen like Cho and the Supreme Court justices who think more guns are the answer.

Patrick Walsh is a writer who lives in Princeton. He served as a rifle platoon leader, battalion adjutant, and company executive officer in the Fifth Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment.

I served four years as an infantry officer in the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii

"Upon graduating from St. Bonaventure University with a bachelors degree in history in 1989, where he was ROTC, he served four years in active duty at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. “My first job was an infantry platoon leader, training 32 platoons with rifles.” He then served as battalion adjutant, running personnel administration, then became the personal assistant to the battalion commander, then executive officer of a rifle company. “This was during the Gulf War and we had a tremendous amount of training for combat, though we did not go overseas.”

He picked an early version of the 2A to back up his interpretation. Big deal. You can find early versions of all the Amendments (including some that didn't make the cut) which put a different spin on things. It doesn't matter; there's a REASON WHY it didn't make the cut.

I get tired of this repeated ignorance of the definition of "militia" in the 1700s and its foundation in an armed and prepared citizenry, not a full or part time body of paid volunteers.

His dismissal of VA Tech's tragedy doesn't align well with what we've been hearing about in China; and he seems to think that genies can actually be put back into bottles.

He's a disgrace and an embarrassment. Where's Patton when you need him?

A man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war. And afterward he turns the rifle in at the armory, and he believes he's finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands - love a woman, build a house, change his son's diaper - his hands remember the rifle.

A gun's power is arbitrary and wildly disproportionate to its price, size, and ease of use. Before the advent of firearms, becoming dangerous meant years of training, if not membership in a warrior caste.

This is precisely why I am a fan of firearms. When a man cannot devote his life to the martial studies, he becomes the servant of those who do (be they lords with armies, or simple thugs).

Even the treacherous, 27-word version of the amendment with which we contend today retains and begins with the phrase, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state ..."

It is apparent that Walsh does not do much reading because the milita argument was rejected in the Heller case. The fat lady has already sang on that point.

As to his veterans status - I would never dinigrate the status of a non-combat vet. However, because he attempts to use his "great military background" as his gimmick to tout his politics, his military background does not impress me in the least.

Sadly, I've met some similar people, both former and current officers. They're usually the ones who only joined to get college paid for and get out. Good riddance. While I normally believe that all who have served deserve some thanks and respect, there are those like this guy who need to forget that they served and quit trying to use their brief service as a pulpit from which to spew this type of nonsense.

AlabamaConstitution of 1819: That every citizen has a right to bear arms in defence of himself and the state.
The world doesn't owe you anything. It was here first.-Mark Twain
"Life's tough. It's tougher if you're stupid."-John Wayne
Sig P228; Micro Desert Eagle; S&W M&P Compact .357 sig

No matter how many men he trained, no matter how many years of education he has, no matter how good his intentions are, the only way he and his ilk have of banning guns is to pass laws that are obeyed by, ugh, oh, law abiding citizens, who only need them to protect themselves against, who? That would be CRIMINALS. Definition of criminal: a person who does not obey laws. So passing more laws would take the guns away from whom? And this would help stop violent crime, how? Anyone with Mr. Walsh's background should be able to connect the dots. But as we all know, even those of us who are uneducated gun huggers who never trained anybody, liberal demagogues live in their own idealistic world. A world in which they would prefer guns had never been invented. But in the world that we all live in, guns have been around for hundreds of years. "Get over it!"

The Gun is Civilization by Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret) Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it. In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some. When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender. There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we'd be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger's potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat--it has no validity when most of a mugger's potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly. Then there's the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don't constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that's as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn't work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn't both lethal and easily employable. When I carry a gun, I don't do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I'm looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don't carry it because I'm afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn't limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation... and that's why carrying a gun is a civilized act. By Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret) So the greatest civilization is one where all citizens are equally armed and can only be persuaded, never forced.